Tag Archives: weight loss

A month in, and I’ve made more progress than I could have hoped – exactly 4 kg down (expect this rate of weight loss to half this month now that I’ve got off the ‘easy’ fat), and my push-up and sit-up challenges are going OK. By the end of Feb I should be back to my pre wedding weight (and within the ‘normal’ range on official BMI), and by the end of May I should be at my ultimate target weight – if I can keep it up that long!

So, I’ve made to week three of January and the diet is still in full swing. My slightly obsessive tendencies have kicked in and I’m logging every calorie consumed on Dailyburn, I’m back in my old jeans and I’m down the best part of 3kg. The pace of weight loss will slow dramatically now – and I’ll be lucky to lose 0.5kg a week. But that’s sustainable and all I’m hoping for, so with any luck by March I’ll be down to below the ‘overweight’ threshold on the BMI, and by June I’ll be close to my long-term target weight. But we will see!

Yesterday was apparently ‘blue Monday‘ – the most depressed day of the year – but I managed to get through it in reasonably good humour. Being busy at work, slightly ill, and very obsessive is definitely helping the process along. Hopefully when I get a bit further into the process, and the weather starts to improve, my willpower for running will return and I can get that programme going too – but for now, all the exercise I’m doing is the hundredpushups/twohundredsitups programmes, as dictated by my iPhone daily!

Seeing as I’m in Malaysia for the next few weeks all my running training is happening on a treadmill. Which I broke today after my first run – a 5ker which I finished in 27.45. Theoretically this is a good time for me but in practice – the treadmill makes things so much easier I should be able to get closer to a 20 minute 5k. See if I can manage that this trip, once the treadmill repair people see if they can replace the part… Not that its a cheap treadmill (it’s not) or I’m a heavy lump (less obviously untrue) but suspect some of the plastic goes brittle in the hot humid conditions…

The speed wasn’t inspired by this, but in an interestind sidebar: My Dad’s friend popped over the other night and recommended PACE training for fatburning (which I need, the fatburning not necessarily the PACE training). I’d not heard of it before and am slightly suspicious of it despite the logic, which is (in part) – you want to get into the fat burning zone and stay there long enough for your body to switch substrates, but not convince your body to switch to creating fat to support the ‘habit’ – a consequence of which is you should chuck your long distance running/ aerobics routine.

I’m vastly suspicious of anything that tries to make weight loss sound ‘easy’ and Dr Sears’ method sounds a bit too good to be true (12 minute workouts etc)…

I need to understand more about human metabolism. I wish Ben Goldacre would write a book about this stuff as between this and the nutrionist stuff he writes about in Bad Science I’m sure there’s a bunch of debunking (or at least: rational explaining) of this, Sears, Atkins, and every other populist weight-loss plan we get confronted with at parties so that I could provide a semi-definitive – “it sounds great but like too much work for me” or “the science makes no sense.”

Anyway, I mostly run for fun rather than weightloss (although that’s a necessary objective for me if I’m to break a 2hr time for the half this year).

I finished off day 16 of Juneathon with another 60 crunches and a few push-ups not even worth counting. A pretty depressing day on the exercise front, and the knee not feeling substantially better – and no material change this morning, so didn’t even attempt cycling. This morning’s effort was another 60 crunches which I’ll top up with some more this evening; see if I can do a thousand or so crunches in the next five days of enforced no running – adding deep stretching and push-ups as the week progresses.

But as to the subject line; people who’ve known me for a while (say, more than 18 months) will know that I was a little tubby up to Apr 09 or thereabouts. In the run-up to the wedding I lost about 19kg, dropping my BMI from 29 (on the verge of obese) to 25 (on the threshold of normal), which I was pretty pleased about. When I saw the Doc yesterday about my knee, whilst he did congratulate me on “turning my life around”, he did make clear that as a man of South Asian origin my propensity for type 2 diabetes (the type caused by having too much fat in your system) is much higher and I should be aiming for a BMI of 23. This is going to mean another 5-7kg (the best part of a stone!) needs to be lost. Whilst this was the long term plan anyway, it was a bit frustrating – I thought I’d met the ‘healthy’ goalpost and was just aiming for ‘fit’ whereas it now feels like I’m still in the fat camp fighting my way out.

But I will do it, damnit. I’ll kick the crap out of my genes by any means I have available, even if it means I become a calorie counting nark once again. Bring it on.